This book makes a major contribution to studies in intercultural communication (IC), providing robust evidence to support the teaching of pragmatic skills (and specifically backchannel behaviour) to L2 learners of English. Through a detailed and sophisticated tour through the literature on IC, backchannels and the Japanese context, and a detailed explication of his research project, Cutrone illuminates our understanding of ... Read morean area previously unresearched. This book is compulsory reading for any academic or advanced student interested in the pragmatics of IC. - Dr Lisa McEntee-Atalianis, Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication, Birkbeck, University of London This book details a fascinating study in which the English of Japanese learners comes under the microscope. The book focuses meticulously on how Japanese speakers behave as listeners. Their listenership behaviour is observed and described in terms of their use of backchannels in conversations with American native speakers of English. The results clearly point to the cultural differences in listenership behaviours and, in turn, illuminate how these differences can be negatively stereotyping for learners. The book also details a classroom study where listenership instruction was tracked over time, among three groups. For anyone interested in English Language Teaching, discourse and intercultural communication, this book is a wonderful model of meticulousness and rigour, leading to solid insights from empirical data and classroom practice. - Dr Anne O'Keeffe, Center for Applied Language Studies, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick The teaching of discourse features in relation to speaking in a second language is becoming a very important topic. Pino Cutrone's study of backchannels provides a very interesting account of a careful piece of research in this sub-field which is well worth reading by teachers and researchers alike. - Dr Alan Tonkyn, Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics, Department of English Language and Literature, School of Literature and Languages, The University of Reading Show Less